Renegade's Return

The British had caught William Joyce, alias Lord Haw Haw, the Humbug of Hamburg, and they knew exactly what to do with him. He stood accused of one of the oldest crimes known to man: treason.

A cell was ready & waiting in London's Old Bailey. In the old days, a man convicted of treason would have been dragged behind a horse to the scaffold, hanged, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered. Now, after due trial, he would simply be taken to the Tower and hanged.

Joyce was an obscure fascist bully boy in 1939 when he fled England, a week before war began. He took with him a quantity of his wife's household goods, the funds of his National Socialist League and a Manchester show girl. During the sad days of Dunkirk and Norway, the horrors of the blitz and the better days that followed, Britons listened with amusement to Joyce's silken sarcasm and twisted truth on the German radio. They often noted his plea: "To some I may seem a traitor, but hear me out."

They heard him out. His broadcasts offered a certain comic relief from the dull BBC, and in the long run they only toughened the tough British spirit. A musical comedy was written around the Haw Haw theme and a mystery thriller was named for him.

After a last drunken, hysterical broadcast, Joyce hid in a Flensburg hotel until he was shooed out by British soldiers, who thought he was a German. Later, on a road leading to Denmark, he met two British officers who were gathering firewood. Joyce could not resist the temptation to show off his ripe Oxonian accent.

"I used to gather firewood myself," said he.

"You're Joyce," said one of the officers.

Joyce admitted it. Then, as he seemed to be reaching for a gun, the officer shot him--in the backside.

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